“Then we have a six-year break before Chelsea Hart,” Rogan said.

“Exactly, and six years is a long time. By now, he’s no longer worried about law enforcement detecting a pattern. He does what he truly wants. And after six years of controlling himself, he’s got a lot of pent-up violence. He strangles her, cuts her up, and hacks off all her hair.”

“Just like Lucy Feeney,” Donovan said.

Ellie nodded. “That’s why I’m fairly confident that we’re going to find out that Lucy Feeney was his first. Or if he did kill before, it was in another series preceded by another long break, or it was outside the New York City area.”

“So why the hiatus?” Simon Knight leaned back in his office chair and steepled his fingers beneath his chiseled chin.

She shrugged. “He could have been in prison for something else. He could have been in some kind of long-term relationship that somehow satisfied his urges. His life could have changed in a way where he no longer needed to kill to feel satisfied.”

William Summer had stopped murdering women in Wichita around the same time he earned a promotion at his job working private security at a gated community in the suburbs. After his arrest, the residents reported a pattern of abuses of Summer’s power, such as it was. Armchair psychologists had concluded that the new responsibilities in his job had satisfied his egotistical need for control in a way that only murder previously could.

“But now he’s back,” Rogan said, “and that apparently has something to do with you. He dumps Chelsea Hart where you’ll find her, setting her cell phone alarm for added assurances. And he dumps Rachel Peck outside Vibrations, knowing you’ll get wind of it from your brother.”

It felt good to hear her partner articulate the theory aloud. No cynicism. No sarcasm.

“And he messes with Rachel’s hair to send a message to me. This is where we’re way past starting from scratch.”

“Because, as lovable as you are, only so many people can be jonesing to fuck with you this hard.”

“Or one would hope,” Ellie said. “I’ve only been on the job five years, and until a couple of months ago, I was working fraud cases. I only got major time on a handful of creeps, and most of those are still in the pen.”

Simon Knight followed the implications. “So we need to look at your old cases and look for enemies who went to prison after the Alice Butler murder, who recently got sprung.”

“There’s a shot. I’ve been thinking about this, though, and there’s another possibility.”

Ellie paused, making sure she had their complete attention.

“Our guy could be a cop.” She watched the surprise register on all three faces, particularly Rogan’s. With him, it was more than hearing the unexpected. It was the shock of a slap to the face. “I don’t like this theory. At all. But I keep coming back to the timing. I got my assignment to the homicide unit a month ago. I was actually working in the squad for only a week before Chelsea Hart turned up on my running path. He wants to engage us. He wants us to know that after hiding his pattern for so long, he’s coming out to play. And it seems like the person he really wants to play with is me-and I was warned going in that other cops would resent my assignment to homicide.”

“The coming out to play is what’s been tripping me up,” Rogan said. “He bobs and weaves, denying himself the cutting that seems to define his MO. But now he drops a billboard in your front yard.”

“So the question is, Why is he upping the ante after getting away with it for so long? One possibility is, it’s a bad guy I put away in the past. But it’s awfully coincidental that when they get sprung from custody, I just happen to be in the homicide unit, where I can catch the new cases. Another possibility is that we’ve got a cop who stopped for some reason but has now decided to kill again as a way to challenge me.”

“He was clean as a whistle with Chelsea Hart,” Rogan said.

“Right. The only physical evidence we found on her pointed us to Jake Myers. One of the lead detectives on Rachel Peck’s case tells me there’s no physical evidence with her, at least so far. And I’ve seen the files on Feeney, Harrington, and Butler-no blood, no semen, no hairs. This guy is good. And he knows the pattern of city homicides. He knows he can obscure the serial nature of his murders by committing them at night, against drunken party girls, who go down in the books as unsolveds-lessons to be learned by others.”

“Any suggestions on where to look in the NYPD for a person like this?” Knight asked.

“Don’t look at me,” Rogan said. “Hatcher can attest that I was home at bed with my woman when Chelsea Hart was killed. She woke my ass up.”

“Well, we can apparently exclude Rogan and myself. That leaves approximately thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight cops.”

“Do I look like I’m in the mood for jokes right now?” Knight asked. He certainly did not.

Ellie adopted a more somber tone. “I suppose we start by looking at anyone who’s been trying to get into homicide and feels passed over. I think we’ve also got to look at the current homicide squad. They’ve got reason to resent me, plus it’s possible they got wind of Flann snooping around a few years ago, and that would explain why the murders stopped until after his death.”

“So now what?” Donovan asked.

She was about to set out a process for going forward, but Simon Knight interrupted her.

“You all go home for a break, and I call the commisioner. We take a new look at everything tomorrow with an expanded task force, most likely with the assistance of the FBI.”

“Wait a second-” Ellie’s words cut into Rogan’s louder statement of “Absolutely not.”

“We can do this, sir,” she said.

“And we don’t need a break to regroup tomorrow,” Rogan added. “This is our case, and we want to work it.”

“You will work it, but the question of how and with what other personnel is a decision well above your pay grade, and well outside the boundaries of this office. The Chelsea Hart case was being worked out of this office’s Homicide Investigation Unit, with you in my command, because an arrest had been made and we were doing everything with an eye toward the prosecution of Jake Myers. Now that we’re all agreed that we have no murder case against Myers, the two of you go back to police command, where they can figure out what to do with this-I think it’s safe to say-clusterfuck.”

Ellie could see precisely where Knight was headed. He would tell the mayor and the police commissioner that his office had done everything it could with the case that had been given to them so hastily, but had no choice but to dismiss the charges once they had exonerated Jake Myers. Without a suspect, Knight was free to extract himself from the mayhem. Just as Rogan had warned, Knight cared more about himself than he ever would about them.

“No offense, sir, but I hope you’ll point out to police command that Rogan and I deserve to run this. I’m the one the killer wants to engage. The more he’s getting what he wants on that front, the more likely he’s going to do something that will lead us to him.”

“The counterargument, Detective, is that the more he gets to push your buttons, the more dangerous he becomes. We know for a fact that the Daily Post’s break of this story is imminent. Who knows what kind of reaction that could trigger from him.”

“We need to warn people,” she said. She did not want to look at herself in the mirror tomorrow morning if the killer claimed another victim while she was taking Simon Knight’s mandated “break.”

“I don’t want to do anything that validates the Daily Post’s story,” Knight said. “It’s premature.”

“We don’t need to validate the story. Any casual news watcher is going to at least wonder if there’s a connection between the deaths of Chelsea Hart and Rachel Peck. Even without confirming that we’re looking at a single killer, we can contact the clubs and bars. Make sure they’re watching girls, warning them about wandering off alone.”